Time To Kill The “Clean Plate Club”

I always thought this was something that only my parents talked about until recently when I heard a few friends use the same term – “clean plate club”. So, maybe more of you are familiar with these words:

“You have to finish what you were served. Don’t you want to be part of the clean plate club? People are starving around the world while you have all this food.”

I just assumed that my dad who was one of eleven kids who grew up in the Depression had this as a reality of limited food. It took me years to realize that this framework was a recipe for disaster in today’s age. When you go to restaurants that serve you huge plates of food and apply this mental framework, you are bound to over-eat site.

This is a great example of how something framed early in life can drive behavior. That’s one of the key concepts when planning healthcare communications is understanding the frameworks that consumers / members / patients have about their physician, their health insurer, their pharmacist, generic drugs, mail order, and a variety of other healthcare topics.